Insider jokes are not just for White House Correspondents’ Assn. Dinners or ESPN kibitzers or Academy Awards emcees. They also crop up in discussions about symphony orchestra musicians — a society unto itself. There are jibes and even sober-minded studies that characterize personality types according to the instruments they play. Who are the string players? […]

Title: “Sacred Steps” from Song Offerings (Gitanjali) Text: Rabindranath Tagore Music: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB Product medium: PDF score Sample:

“If all would play first violin, we could not obtain an orchestra. Therefore esteem every musician in his place.” — Robert Schumann Robert Schumann (translated by Henry Hugo Pierson), Advice to Young Musicains [Musikalische Haus- und Lebens-Regeln]. New York: J. Schuberth & Co. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28219/28219-h/28219-h.htm, accessed 29 August 2021.

“What greater pleasure is there is life than giving young and beautiful talent a little lift in the direction of the stars though they will never reach them.” Sir Clifford Curzon – English pianist Pianist, No. 59, April-May 2011, Warner Group publications, p.10.

Vaughan Williams gave a broadcast talk on Bach entitled “Bach the Great Bourgeois.” It was later published in The Listener. Vaughan Williams, who was involved in performances of works such as Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion as part of the Leith Hill Festival, offered some insight in contemporary approaches to Bach performance: WHEN I was a […]

“Any Broadway musical would be lucky to include a single number this good.” — Janet Maslin, in The New York Times on Alan Menken/Howard Ashman’s “Part of Your World,” from The Little Mermaid.  Darryn King, “Alan Menken: The Man Who Relaunched Disney’s Fortunes with Songs,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July, 2016. http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/alan-menken-the-man-who-relaunched-disneys-fortunes-with-hit-songs-20160714-gq5o6v.html. Accessed 16 July 2016.

Music theatre writer Oscar Hammerstein loved to play games.  His nephew recalls: There’s a family story about his game-playing. I can’t vouch for its authenticity, but it rings true. He was playing a very informal game of bridge with two of his collaborators, the composers Jerome Kern and Sigmund Romberg, and someone else one afternoon. […]

An art gathers new material usually by an original rejection of old formulae, a gesture of negation. At the beginning, this gesture is conscious, defiant, it lacks any other reason for existence than the very healthy one that dogma is death. In the turmoil of growth and expansion, this negation and denial loses its identity […]

Brucker was invited by Hans Richter to conduct one of his symphonies with the Vienna Society of Friends of Music. At the rehearsal he stood on the conductor’s platform, stick in hand, with a beatific smile on his face. The orchestra were all ready to begin, but he would not lift his stick to give […]

“I may not be better than other people, but at least I’m different.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Franco-Swiss philosopher and writer.